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JOHN MILTON 



JOHN MILTON 



A PAPER 

READ BEFORE THE 

CHICAGO LITERARY CLUB 

MONDAY EVENING 

DECEMBER 7, 1908 

IN CELEBRATION OF THE 

TERCENTENARY 

OF THE POET'S BIRTH 



BY 
CHARLES JOSEPH LITTLE 




CHICAGO LITERARY CLUB 
1909 



v^^. 



UBRARYotCONGptSsJ 
Two Copies Received - 

MAR 3 1809 

Gup.-'M&.it Entry 



Copyright, 1909 
CHARLES JOSEPH LITTLE 




JOHN MI LTON 

** The work some praise, 
And some the architect." 



These are 
Mulciber, 



J 



Milton's words concerning 



** Whose hand was known in Heaven 
By many a towered structure high, 
Where sceptred angels hold their residence.*' 

Suffer me to praise the architect and 
only incidentally the work. 

The first edition of Milton's minor 
poems appeared in 1645. The frontis- 
piece was an engraved portrait of a morose 
and rather stupid-faced Englishman, whose 
long hair, parted in the middle, fell down 
on both sides to the high collar around the 
neck. Beneath the picture one could read 
in Latin, '^John Milton, Englishman, in 
his twenty-first year*'; and in Greek, four 
lines furnished to the engraver in jest by 
Milton himself. Roughly translated, the 
poet's mischief reads: 



"That some uncunning hand this face had carved 
Quickly you 'd say, the living features seen, 
But finding here no trait of me, my friends 
Laugh at the bungling graver's sorry botch." 

This was the beginning only of a fate 
that has pursued Milton down to our day. 
Marshall, the engraver, though, sinned with- 
out malice, while Samuel Johnson, most 
illustrious of Milton's subsequent detrac- 
tors, poured out upon the citizen a brew 
of falsehood and spleen which no praise of 
the poet could expiate. For the poet had 
committed that greatest of crimes : he 
had taken sides in an internecine political 
struggle, and taken, too, what seemed to 
Johnson and Hume and all the Tories 
of England and of Europe, the side of 
traitors and anarchists who had beheaded 
statesmen and bishops, and finally a king, 
and in their revolutionary frenzy enfeebled 
for all time the sacredness of hereditary 
privilege and the efficacy of consecrating 
oil. 

To understand Milton we must begin 
here. He was known to most of his con- 
temporaries, not as a poet, but as a writer 
of political pamphlets at a time when, as 
the publisher of these minor poems de- 
clared, ^^the slightest pamphlet was more 
vendible than the works of learnedest 
men.'' Before this collection of poems 
was published, Milton's tractates upon 



reformation and episcopacy, the tractate 
upon divorce, and the Areopagiticdj the 
speech for the Hberty of unhcensed print- 
ing, had made their author notorious, 
rather than famous; he had provoked the 
wrath of EpiscopaUan and Presbyterian, of 
royahsts and compromisers, in the days 
when ears were cropped and the heads- 
man's axe was not unfrequently the final 
argument. 

Not a few of his biographers declare 
with lofty self-complacency that Milton's 
pamphlets had scant influence upon the 
direction of events. This is true of all 
really great political writing ; as true of 
Edmund Burke, of Wilhelm von Humboldt, 
of Francis Lieber, as it is of John Milton. 
For the really great political writer sees 
things from that ampler ether into which 
the lesser spirits never soar. His influence, 
moreover, asserts itself rather in the assent 
of the thinking few and in the resistance that 
he provokes from the interests he assails, 
than in the number of the admirers and 
adherents that he attracts. Milton was an 
independent of no narrow spirit, a Christian 
who belonged to no sect, a patriot who 
belonged to no party, a Puritan whose 
conscience reaffirmed the laws of God, 
often by defying the enactments and tradi- 
tions of men. Independence like this can 
never become popular; and if supported 



by unflinching courage and resplendent 
genius, it is sure to be decried, denounced, 
misrepresented, and maligned. That Mil- 
ton never feared the face of man, these 
pamphlets amply prove. That his genius 
transcended that of his contemporaries, 
Hobbes, Selden, Sir Thomas Browne, Jere- 
my Taylor, to mention the immortals only, 
leaps to the mind of every intelligent reader 
of the Areopagitica, That he possessed the 
prophetic quality which is the very eye of 
inspiration, three succeeding centuries have 
attested, for the principles that Milton 
championed and defended, even the princi- 
ple that penetrates and redeems his treatises 
upon divorce, have become the common- 
places of our modern political and social 
creeds. Who believes to-day either in the 
divine right of kings, as held by Laud the 
bishop, or in the hereditary inalienability of 
a kingly crown, as held afterward by Black- 
stone the lawyer ? Who now refuses sanc- 
tion to Milton's noble contention that a 
/"true marraige must be something finer and 
diviner than a union of two bodies, that it 
must be a harmony of souls attuned to a 
concord of thought and purpose, a com- 
panionship of sorrow mitigated by love and 
of delights intensified by mutual partici- 
pation.'^ 

Who does not share with Milton the 
desire and hope for that nobler ministry of 

10 



truth from which the hirelings shall be 
driven by the lash of public scorn ? and 
who, whatever be his belief or disbelief, 
does not thrill at Milton's picture of the 
coming of ' ' the King who shall put an end 
to all earthly tyrannies, proclaiming his uni- 
versal and mild monarchy through heaven 
and earth ; where they that by their labours, 
counsels, and prayers have been in earnest 
for the common good of religion and their 
country shall in superabundance of beatific 
vision progressing the dateless and irrevolu- 
ble circle of eternity, clasp inseparable 
hands with joy and bliss, in over-measure 
forever?'' 

Who would reinstate the censor now? 
But if it were attempted, what better ar- 
guments to defeat it than those of Milton ? 
^* As good almost kill a man as kill a good 
book; who kills a man kills a reasonable 
creature, God's image ; but he who destroys 
a good book kills reason itself, kills the 
image of God, as it were, in the eye. Many 
a man lives a burden to the earth ; but a good 
book is the precious life-blood of a master 
spirit, embalmed and treasured up on pur- 
pose to a life beyond life." ''Though all 
the winds of doctrine were let loose to prey 
upon the earth, so truth be in the field, we 
do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting 
to misdoubt her strength. Let her and 
falsehood grapple ; who ever knew truth 

II 



put to the worse on a free and open en- 
counter? Who knows not that truth is 
strong next to the Almighty; she needs no 
poHcies, nor strategems nor Hcensings, to 
make her victorious ; those are the shifts and 
defenses that error uses against her power : 
give her but room and do not bind her 
when she sleeps, for then she speaks not 
true, as . the old Proteus did who spake 
oracles only when he was caught and 
bound, but then rather she turns herself 
into all shapes except her own, and tunes 
her voice according to the time/' 

The speech for the liberty of unlicensed 
printing appeared in 1644, while the first 
edition of his minor poems was in press. 
But, as his publisher complained, the peo- 
ple were in no mood for literature, least 
of all for poetry like L' Allegro and II 
Penseroso, or even for a work of perfect 
art like Comus. Strafford had gone to the 
block, and Laud's head was unsteady on 
his shoulders ; King Charles was nearing 
the battle-field of Naseby and the scaffold ; 
an assembly of divines, meeting in the Jeru- 
salem chamber at Westminster, were draw- 
ing up a confession of faith which might 
serve as an iron-clad test to separate the 
band of Gideon from Jehovah's enemies; 
sects were multiplying with diabolical rapid- 
ity, sixteen of them flourishing in defiance 
of the law. ''We detest and abhor the 



12 



much endeavored toleration/' wrote the 
London clergy. ' ' Parliament will gracious- 
ly suppress all sects without toleration/' 
petitioned the corporation of the city. Mil- 
ton had already noted with his yet unblinded 
eyes that ''New Presbyter was only old 
priest writ large, ' ' while Cromwell had ut- 
tered his noble and mighty words, ''He 
that ventures his life for the liberty of his 
country, I wish he would trust God for the 
liberty of his concience.'' *'From breth- 
ren in things of the mind we look for no 
compulsion but that of light and reason. ' ' 

Our self-complacent aftersight enables 
us to see, now when three centuries have 
elapsed, that Milton the poet soars far above 
the pamphleteer ; accordingly, with solemn 
arrogance we summon him to judgment for 
wasting his genius in controversy, deploring 
the loss of certain never-written poems. 
This vaunted aftersight is blind misunder- 
standing. Let us listen to the man him- 
self ! ' ' As for the other points, what God 
may have determined for me I know not ; 
but this I know, that if He ever instilled 
an intense love of moral beauty into the 
breast of any man. He has instilled it into 
mine : Ceres, in the fable, pursued not her 
daughter with a greater keenness of inquiry 
than I, day and night, the idea of perfection. 
Hence, whenever I find a man despising 
the false estimates of the vulgar, and daring 

13 



to aspire, in sentiment, language, and con- 
duct, to what the highest wisdom through 
every age has taught us as most excellent, 
to him I unite myself by a sort of necessary 
attachment ; and if I am so influenced by 
nature or destiny that by no exertion or 
labours of my own I may exalt myself to 
this summit of worth and honour, yet no 
powers of heaven or earth will hinder me 
from looking with reverence and affection 
upon those who have thoroughly attained 
this glory, or appear in the successful pur- 
suit of it. You inquire with a kind of solici- 
tude even into my thoughts. Hear, then, 
Diodati, but let me whisper in your ear, that 
I may not blush at my reply — I think (so 
help me Heaven!) of immortality. You in- 
quire, also, what I am about ? I nurse my 
wings, and meditate a flight; but my Peg- 
asus rises as yet on very tender pinions. 
Let us be humbly wise." 

He thinks of immortality! And yet he 
accepts in early manhood ''the lot however 
mean or high towards which Time leads 
him and the will of Heaven. All is, if he 
has grace to use it so, as ever in his great 
Taskmaster's eye." '^For he was con- 
firmed in this opinion, that he who would 
not be frustrate of his hope to write well in 
laudable things, ought himself to be a true 
poem." A believer in the majesty of 
man's free will, he was a believer, too, in 

14 



that eternal spirit ' ' who can enrich with 
all utterance and knowledge, and sends out 
His seraphim, with the hallowed fire of His 
altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom 
he pleases : to this must be added industri- 
ous and select reading, steady observation, 
insight into all seemly and generous arts 
and affairs/' Observation and insight he 
sought in Italy, and would have sought 
in Greece. But *'the melancholy intelli- 
gence,'' he tells us, ** which I received of 
the civil commotions in England made me 
alter my purpose ; for I thought it base to 
be traveling for amusement abroad while 
my fellow-citizens were fighting for liberty 
at home." He had no love for contro- 
versy, especially in an age of brutal recrim- 
ination and barbarous cruelty ; in fact, he 
hated it for its own sake and for the abuse 
and slander that it would surely bring upon 
him. 

Listen again: ^'For, surely, to every 
good and peaceable man, it must in nature 
needs be a hateful thing to be the displeaser 
and molester of thousands; much better 
would it please him, undoubtedly, to be the 
messenger of gladness and contentment, 
which is his chief intended business to all 
mankind, but that they resist and oppose 
their own true happiness. But when God 
commands to take the trumpet and blow a 
dolorous and jarring blast, it lies not in 

15 



man's will what he shall conceal/' *' Which 
might teach these times not suddenly to 
condemn all things that are sharply spoken 
or vehemently written, as proceeding out of 
stomach, virulence, or ill-nature." 

'*No man can be justly offended with 
him that shall endeavour to impart or be- 
stow, without any gain to himself, those 
sharp and saving words which would be a 
terror and a torment in him to keep back. 
For me, I have determined to lay up, as the 
best treasure and solace of a good old age, if 
God vouchsafe it me, the honest liberty of 
free speech from my youth, when I shall 
think it available in so dear a concernment 
as the church's good." Moreover, he im- 
agined his Master saying, *^ When time was, 
thou couldst not find a syllable of all thou 
hast read or studied to utter in my behalf ? 
Yet ease and leisure was given thee for thy 
retired thoughts out of the sweat of other 
men. Thou hast the diligence, the parts, 
the language of a man, if a vain subject 
were to be adorned or beautified ; but 
when the cause of God and His Church 
was to be pleaded, for which purpose that 
tongue was given thee which thou hast, 
God listened if He could hear thy voice 
among his zealous servants, but thou wert 
dumb as a beast; from henceforward be 
that which thine own brutish silence hath 
made thee." This believer in immortality 

i6 



feared to be punished ''in the shape he 
sinned/' with everlasting ''brutish si- 
lence." 

His prose inferior to his poetry ? Who 
knew this better than Milton? Who de- 
clared in the very moment of self-immola- 
tion: "This manner of writing, wherein 
knowing myself inferior to myself, led by 
the genial power of nature to another task, 
I have the use, as I may account, but of 
my left hand." 

Many in these later centuries have sym- 
pathized with Milton in his blindness; all 
the more because he 'lost his sight in the 
service of his country, writing the defense 
of the English people. But the left-handed 
Milton is no less a patriot than the sight- 
less bard listening to Archangel ruined, or 
to the harpings and hallelujahs of the angels 
that renew their strength in glimpses of 
God's face. Nay, the sacrifice was even 
greater. It consumed the best years of 
his life ; he was thirty-three when he wrote 
the first, and fifty-two when he wrote the 
last, of his controversial pamphlets. They 
cost him his eyes and the use for two 
decades of the wonderful right hand that 
wrote the Paradise Lost and the Samson 
Agonistes. Does the history of poetry or 
the history of patriotism anywhere record 
a nobler sacrifice.'^ Milton was neither 
poor nor greedy ; he was rich enough to 

17 



write poems at his leisure; like i Socrates, 
his wants were few. He was never phys- 
ically strong; there was no guarantee, 
human or divine, that he would escape cap- 
tivity or the scaffold, or live to old age. Yet 
he placed upon the altar of English liberty 
all the poems teeming in his prolific brain, 
all the thoughts that wandered through 
eternity. But God, who in the ancient 
story at once inspired and refused the sac- 
rifice of Abraham's child of promise, the 
God of Milton, gave back to him and to 
literature the offered song, the guerdon 
of his unshaken faith, and the poem lost in 
the turmoil of the revolution was regained 
amid the revels and the persecutions of the 
Restoration. As the Stuarts remounted 
for a brief space the throne of England, to 
cover the stains of their father's blood with 
darker stains of immorality and cruelty 
then Milton soared serenely to the throne 
of the immortals, to sit down with Homer 
and Lucretius and Dante and Spenser, not 
the least of that illustrious company who 
brighten with celestial splendor and soften 
with celestial melodies *'the smoke and 
stir of this dim spot that men call earth." 

Misread him not, however. His was no 
unpremeditated sacrifice, made in ignorance 
of consequences. It is Milton's glory that 
he counted the cost correctly, even to the 
slanders that would be heaped upon him, 

i8 



and that he paid it notwithstanding. He 
knew his age and its favorite methods of 
reply, the prison and the pillory, and when 
these were not possible, abusive lies and 
slanders. Here is an early specimen. 
''Of late, since he was out of wit and 
clothes, he is now clothed in serge and 
confined to a parlour, where he blasphemes 
God and the king as ordinarily erstwhile he 
drank sack and swore. Hear him speak ! 
Christian, dost thou like these passages.^ 
Or doth thy heart rise against such un- 
seemly beastliness ? Nay, but take this 
head . . . Horrid blasphemy ! You that 
love Christ, and know this miscreant wretch, 
stone him to death, lest yourselves smart 
for his impunity. ' ' 

True, we owe to this abuse those radiant 
bits of autobiography, imbedded like jewels 
in the controversial pamphlets. Milton 
never skulked, as many do even in our 
time, behind the plea that a man's charac- 
ter has nothing to do with his opinions. 
For Milton, a man's bad character discred- 
ited his opinions, especially where moral 
issues were involved. Skilled musician as 
he was, he would have scoffed at those 
who, albeit music-deaf, chatter glibly of the 
concord of sweet sounds. Apostates from 
liberty, tyrants and sycophants, hirelings 
and bribe-takers, he believed, were not in- 
spired to instruct free Englishmen in civil 

19 



or religious duty. To unmask them was, 
therefore, to refute them. If he himself 
were such, he had no duty, nay, not even 
the right to speak. Therefore he replied 
to his slanderers with noble self-revelation, 
an example followed in our day by John 
Henry Newman in his powerful and suc- 
cessful Apologia. 

And what manner of man did he reveal 1 
The loving son of a very noble father, 
himself an outcast from the paternal home 
for his opinion's sake. Trained to knowl- 
edge and music and independence by this 
same father, who had acquired wealth 
by intelligence and industry, and sent by 
him to Cambridge that he might prepare to 
serve the Church. 

A Puritan in his youth, but not of the 
kind sculptured by Saint Gaudens, or even 
of the Cromwell kind, but one that loved 
Shakespeare and adored Spenser, who de- 
lighted in music and in the friendship of 
noble souls, whose strength was as the 
strength of ten because his heart was pure. 
A shallow critic of Milton's Comus declares 
that Milton could not draw ugliness : *'It 
turns into beauty or majesty in his hands. '' 
He could draw it easily enough, but never 
with love, always with loathing. Comus, 
like Satan, the Serpent, tempts chastity 
with beauty, and only at that entrance was 
Milton himself exposed to evil. Ugly 

20 



wickedness repelled him; meanness and 
cowardice enraged him. A born poet, he 
was also a born artist; like Dante, taking 
infinite pains to acquire technical perfec- 
tion. Like Galileo and Pascal, rebelling at 
the pedants who controlled the learning of 
his time, he was none the less a student, 
w^hose prodigious memory was the ready 
servant of a puissant and far-ranging intel- 
ligence. Not tall, but lithe and erect; his 
slender frame carrying a shapely head 
crowned with light brown hair, which clus- 
tered about an oval face beautiful in form 
and color, and luminous dark-gray glittering 
eyes whose glitter changed to glow when 
thoughts were surging in his brain or feel- 
ing rising in his heart. A sweet and tuneful 
voice made his speech and song attractive, 
while a playful irony blended with a seri- 
ous cheerfulness to brighten all his talk. 
After fourteen years of preparation for it 
and witness of its administration, he re- 
fused to enter the Church. ''He who 
would take orders must subscribe himself 
slave and take an oath withal.'' God's 
servant he would be most willingly, and 
man's too, for that matter. But long before 
the German poet Arndt had written it, 
Milton felt that God who made the iron 
grow in the hillsides had little love for 
slaves. His noble father, one of the no- 
blest in human annals, although reluctant, 



21 



yielded to the scruples of his beloved son, 
who spent six years more in quiet study 
and fifteen months in foreign travel. The 
lad who had criticised the University 
pedants made friends in Paris with Hugo 
Grotius and in Italy with the wisest 
Italians of that gloomy period. Even 
where Galileo then languished a prisoner, 
Milton would not hold his peace when his 
religious views were called in question. 
Indeed, his interview with the ^ ^Tuscan 
artist, ' ' the sightless victim of ecclesiastical 
tyranny, made him the more eager to 
preserve the envied liberty of England 
from the reign of ** thorough, " begun by 
Laud and Strafford, and supported by King 
Charles and his intriguing queen. 

Galileo was then in his seventy-fifth year, 
old, blind, bereft of his beloved daughter, 
yet indomitably determined to defy his per- 
secutors with the last and greatest of his 
dialogues, that upon the New Sciences. 

Did the young poet, rejoicing in the 
vigor of early manhood, have some fore- 
boding of his own destiny as he looked upon 
those rugged features and talked with the 
sightless ** Columbus of the skies?" Did 
he feel the darkness gathering about his 
own head, and the prison walls enclosing 
him, and see in the ministries of Galileo's 
pupils the one remaining comfort of his 
own last days ? Galileo had two daughters, 

22 



one of whom was sour, peevish, morose, and 
selfish, the other a ministering angel while 
she lived, and more than ministering an- 
gel: a companion for her father's mind, 
the greatest then blazing in all earth's gal- 
axy; but a companion taken from him all 
too soon, though still ''calling to him con- 
tinually.'* Milton was to have three 
daughters, of whom one only should be any 
comfort to him, and she rather in love and 
good intention than in intellectual sympa- 
thy. Did Milton hear from Galileo's own 
lips the story of that strange retraction, not 
yet wholly free from mystery, and did he 
swear on hearing it never to fling a stone 
at the wonderful old man, who was even 
then redeeming his defeat and revenging 
his humiliation by the defiant publication 
of the principles that underlie our modern 
dynamics, and now flash their splendor to 
us from every triumph of m.odern engineer- 
ing } I never read Milton's allusions to Gal- 
ileo in his prose and in his poetry without a 
vision of that meeting: the last of the 
giants of the older Italy, the herald of an 
intellectual method that was to change the 
face of the world and transform the reason- 
ing of mankind ; and the last of the Eliza- 
bethan poets, the one born out of due time, 
as he himself declared, but destined to com- 
pose a poem of enduring sublimity, and to 
live a poem of heroic and thrilling majesty. 

23 



Perhaps the noblest passage in Schiller's 
Don Carlos is that in which the Queen begs 
Posa to tell the Prince to reverence the ideals 
of his youth. Ah me ! How few of us at- 
tain to it. In the dire struggle for existence, 
in the rush of competition, tempted by ava- 
rice or ambition or the pride of life, weak- 
ened by strife or by the persuasions of timid 
friends, the ideals that charmed us in the 
golden dawn fade away like the splendors 
of the morning, returning at dusk only as 
reminders of what we might have been. 

John Milton stands forever in the history 
of English politics and of English literature 
as a man who reverenced in mature man- 
hood and in age the ideals of his youth, 
^' never * bating jot of heart of hope, but 
steering right onward.'' I shall not defend 
him from the charges made against him, 
some — and the most — of which are false 
and foolish, and many of which betray a 
signal ignorance of his writings, of his 
history, and of the age and the England in 
which he lived. In Italy he might have 
written a masterpiece of controversy like 
Galileo's Saggiatore; in France he might 
have written letters like Pascal's Provin- 
cials; in England he used the club of Her- 
cules, not the stiletto of the Italian master, 
or like the wonderful French genius, the 
shafts of merciless ridicule and the flaming 
sword of an angry archangel. 

24 



True to his ideals, he looked with fore- 
boding at Cromwell's encroachments upon 
liberty, warning whilst praising him, and 
he closed his defense of the people of 
England with these courageous words: 
**If, as you have been valiant in war, you 
should grow debauched in peace, you that 
have had such visible demonstrations of 
the goodness of God to yourselves and of 
his wrath to your enemies; if it should fall 
out that you have not learned by so ancient 
an example before your eyes to fear God 
and work righteousness ; — then for my part 
I shall easily grant and confess (for I can- 
not deny it) whatever ill man may speak or 
think of you to be very true. And you 
will find in a little time that God's displeas- 
ure against you will be greater than it has 
been against your adversaries, greater than 
his grace and favour have been to your- 
selves, which you have had larger experi- 
ence of than any other nation under 
heaven.'' ''Milton, thou shouldst be liv- 
ing at this hour," and writing for Amer- 
ica! 

''No one," wrote Milton, "ever saw me 
going about, no one ever saw me asking 
anything among my friends, or stationed at 
the doors of the court with a petitioner's 
face or haunting the entries of lesser 
assemblies. I kept myself entirely at 
home, contriving, though burdened with 

25 



taxes in the main rather oppressive, to lead 
my frugal life, when lo ! Charles' kingdom 
having been formed into a republic, the 
Council of State invited me, dreaming of 
nothing of the sort, to give the use of my 
services chiefly in foreign affairs/' Thus 
he became Latin Secretary in the new 
republic, an office which, if not conferred 
by Cromwell, brought his future panegyrist 
and intrepid counsellor into close relations 
with him. But the man that sacrificed his 
eyes to defend the people of England was 
not the man to sacrifice his conscience to 
any ruler, however powerful. Much as he 
admired the Protector, he feared and fore- 
boded the downfall of a republic so depend- 
ent upon a single overmastering mind. 
His fears and forebodings soon turned 
to facts. There were, upon Cromwell's 
death, among England's five millions, not 
men enough to save it from the returning 
Stuarts. Puritanism, as Milton foresaw and 
foretold, had made itself hateful by political 
and social tyranny; even Cromwell came 
to see before his death that Puritanism 
*' had missed its aim." Intellectual forces 
abounded; they were soon to appear, not 
so much in poets like Butler and Dryden, or 
in statesmen like Clarendon, but in the 
Royal Society, and afterwards in Isaac 
Newton. Bacon's skepticism, amplified 
and emboldened, would assert itself in 

26 



Thomas Hobbes, his favorite secretary, 
and theology was to give place to the New 
Philosophy, *^ which from the times of 
Galileo at Florence and Sir Francis Bacon 
in England hath been much cultivated in 
Italy, France, Germany, and other parts 
abroad, as well as in England." Mean- 
while men like Hales and Chillingworth 
were seeing that the Church of England 
might possibly be saved by mitigating and 
simplifying its doctrine, and by a noble 
comprehension of all who lived a righteous 
life, thus hoping vainly (as the sequel 
proved) to gain by tolerance and reason 
what Milton had vainly hoped to gain by 
independence. But in one of those spasms 
which sweep over a nation, all hope of mod- 
eration perished. The corpse of Cromwell 
was torn from its grave and gibbeted at 
Tyburn ; that of Pym cast out of West- 
minster Abbey; Howe and Baxter, the 
ablest preacher and that noblest parish 
priest in England were driven from their 
churches ; John Bunyan was sent to Bedford 
jail while John Milton was imprisoned and 
impoverished. His sight was gone, but his 
spirit was unbroken. True, he had yielded to 
the urging of his friends and gone into hiding 
when his enemies were hoping to see him 
carried to Tyburn in a cart. Mr. Masson 
declares quite truly that there is no greater 
historical puzzle than the complete escape 

27 



of Milton from the scaffold after the Resto- 
ration. * * It was thought a strange omis- 
sion/' wrote Burnet. But to Milton it 
was no puzzle ; it was an act of God, in 
whom he had put his trust, and who would 
not see him put to shame. But whither to 
go and what to do.? Home he hardly 
possessed, for his beloved second wife was 
dead, and the only one of his three daugh- 
ters that loved the blind father, the young- 
est, Deborah, was but nine years old. His 
great Taskmaster, however, had work for 
which he had saved him . Already, in 1658, 
Milton had begun the elaboration of the 
great poem which he had laid aside when 
duty called him to sacrifice his strong right 
arm. He now regained its use. A fee- 
bler soul would have succumbed in such 
surroundings. Evil indeed were the times ; 
his friends dragged to prison or the scaf- 
fold ; the causes for which he had made his 
sacrifices lost apparently forever ; his old 
antagonist, the hypocrite Morus, preach- 
ing in London to the King and his courtiers; 
all the scum of literary England floating to 
the surface ! What an hour for such an 
undertaking! His 'Mate espoused saint'* 
coming to him in dreams only; his oldest 
daughters stealing and selling his books to 
gratify their whims; and his little Deborah 
trying in vain to keep pace with her great 
father's rapid mental stride so as to read 

28 



to him his books of divers tongues. Then, 
to use his own words, 

** Though blind of sight, 
Despised, and thought extinguished quite, 
With inward eyes illuminated, 
His fiery virtue roused 

From under ashes into sudden flame, he like an eagle 
His cloudless thunder bolted on their heads. 
So virtue given for lost. 
Depressed and overthrown, as seemed. 
Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most 
When most unactive deemed, 
And though her body dies, her fame survives.** 

Robert Louis Stevenson remarked jaun- 
tily that we cannot all enjoy Paradise Lost. 
He meant to say that we cannot all or any 
of us enjoy all of it, any more than we can 
enjoy all of Dante's Commedia, or all of 
Shakespeare's Hamlet, or all of Browning's 
Ring and the Book. Poe was nearer right 
when he contended that every long poem 
is really a cluster of short ones, Paradise 
Lost being the chief example. 

Let me consider three points only, points 
that have to do with Milton's character. 
First, the frequent objection that Satan is 
the hero of the poem. Of course he is. 
Why not? The essence of tragedy, as 
every great dramatist from ^schylus to 
Ibsen has perceived, lies in wrong-doing, 
the righteous sufferers being victims always 
of another's unrighteousness, whether, as in 
Prometheus Bound, the wrong-doer be Zeus 

29 



himself, or, as in the Agamemnon, all are 
wrong in different degree. Now, Milton 
at first intended to compose a tragedy. 
The ancient story and his own defect of 
dramatic power made that seem unwise. 
But the tragic elements in the story of the 
fall of Lucifer and of Adam filled his 
mind; the study of Shakespeare, especially 
of the characters of Wolsey and of Lady 
Macbeth, had revealed to him quite early 
the havoc wrought in great natures by 
ambition; while the career of his great 
contemporary Strafford had shown him a 
colossal character ruined by greed and 
pride, and wanton use of giant strength. 
Wolsey's ^^ Cromwell, I charge thee fling 
away ambition, by that sin fell the angels, " 
might be taken as his text. 

Wolsey's wail, ^' If I had served my God 
with half the zeal I served my king, he 
would not in mine age have left me naked 
to mine enemies,'' made Milton doubt his 
other saying that when he fell ''he fell 
like Lucifer." Strafford, however, whose 
trial Milton must have followed spell- 
bound, — Strafford, indeed, resembled an 
archangel ruined, witness his fascination 
for every historian of that momentous 
period. Not Pym, not Hampden, not even 
Cromwell, stirs us as does the haughty, 
brilliant, mentally massive, upward-climb- 
ing Wentworth, struggling in heroic splen- 

30 



dor to avert his doom. I never recall the 
famous passage, 

** Thrice he essayed, and thrice in spite of scorn. 
Tears such as Angels weep burst forth, '^ 

without a vision of Strafford in the presence 
of his judges, he, too, in spite of scorn, help- 
less to check the gushing tears that wet his 
iron cheeks. Precisely here lay all the 
tragedy to Milton, that men like Wolsey 
and Bacon and Strafford should rank with 
the apostates. His scorn for Belial and 
for Mammon, the one ''who seemed com- 
posed for dignity and high exploit, though 
all was false and hollow, ' ' the other expect- 
ing to find even in the desert-soil of hell 
gems and gold, and expecting to exercise 
angelic skill and art in raising even there 
magnificence; — Milton's scorn for both 
of them gleams and stabs like lightning in 
the words of Beelzebub, ''than whom, 
Satan except, none higher sate; who stood 
with Atlantean shoulders fit to bear the 
weight of mightiest monarchies." Milton 
felt his own kinship with these colossal 
spirits, together with his abhorrence at their 
apostasy. That weaklings should go wrong 
in great affairs matters little; but when 
giants waste their strength against the eter- 
nal laws, and thereby involve the living and 
the yet unborn in misery, then these laws 
of God must be followed to their final con- 

31 



sequence, never even in Holy Writ more 
terribly depicted than in those words of 
Satan, whose accompanying shudder trem- 
bles through all the regions of despair: 

** Whither I go is hell ; myself am hell! '* 

We moderns chuckle fondly as ghosts 
and devils and the damned fade from the 
imagination — as though there vanished 
with them the decrees of God — and so 
we fail to read aright our works of genius. 
The grim button-moulder of the Norwegian 
dramatist makes us shiver for a moment 
only with his threat to throw us to the scrap 
pile, but the merry mood succeeds him 
soon. Accordingly on every side of us we 
see colossal powers wasted in daring yet 
unworthy and diabolical enterprises, and in 
competition for that bad eminence which 
ends inevitably in the devastation of all 
that makes men and angels sons of God. 

Again, it is this hatred of evil that dis- 
colors Milton's image of the deity. To 
be sure, the harsher features of the medie- 
val theology had not been softened in the 
bitter doctrinal conflicts of the seventeenth 
century, while the framework chosen by the 
poet for his epic, the story of the fall, com- 
pelled him to attempt the impossible and 
miss. For in his treatise upon Christian 
Doctrine, he declared that to the finite 
mind God must be forever incomprehen- 

32 



sible. But there was in Milton none of that 
jaunty, jesting, sympathy with the incorrigi- 
ble wrong-doer that inspired Burns in his 
farewell to Auld Nickie Ben, and made him 
'^wae to think upon yon den e'en for his 
sake/' Milton, on the contrary, was glad 
to think upon ^'yon den"; and his joy 
seemed to him but a drop from the over- 
flow of God's delight in the condign pun- 
ishment of evil-doers. 

Nothing in Dante's Inferno is more 
terrible than the picture of Satan returning 
triumphantly from Eden and standing ex- 
pectant of the universal shout and high 
applause to fill his ear; when contrary, he 
hears on all sides from innumerable tongues 
a dismal universal hiss, the sound of public 
scorn. 

*' His arms clung to his ribs, his legs intwining 
Each other, till supplanted down he fell 
A monstrous serpent on his belly prone. 
Reluctant, but in vain, a greater power 
Now ruPd him, punishM in the sliape he sinnM. 
According to his doom; he would have spoke, 
But hiss for hiss return'd with forked tongue 
To forked tongue, for now were all transformed 
Alike, to serpents all as accessories 
To his bold riot.*' 

'' Punish'd in the shape he sinn'd!" 
There was the lesson learned from Dante. 
And the power displayed in the description 
is no greater than the poet's exultation, 
which he believes himself to share with 
God and all his loyal angels. 

33 



And yet, our milder conceptions of deity- 
have given us nothing loveHer, and nothing 
wiser, than the words of Adam persuading 
Eve to penitence : 

'* He will instruct us praying, and of grace 
Beseeching him . . . 

What better can we do, than to the place 
Repairing where he judg'd us, prostrate fall 
Before him reverent, and there confess 
Humbly our faults, and pardon beg, with tears 

Undoubtedly he will relent and turn 
From his displeasure; in whose look serene. 
When angry most he seem'd, and mo^t severe^ 
What else but favour, grace, and mercy shone? ** 

Or have these milder conceptions given 
us anything nobler than the lament of Adam 
for the lost epiphanies of God and the 
benignant reply of the Archangel so sweet 
with truth and comfort ? 

** On this mount he appear'd, under this tree 
Stood visible, among these pines his voice 
I heard, here with him at this fountain talk*d.** 

This is the voice of humanity yearning 
for the great companion ; the voice of Schil- 
ler lamenting the vanished gods of Greece, 
the voice of Musset crying in the October 
night for God to bow the heavens and 
come down, the voice of Leopardi scanning 
in vain the Orient sky for tokens of His 
presence, the voice of Wordsworth com- 
plaining: 

34 



*' Great God! I 'd rather be 
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn ; 
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; 
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, 
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 

But what says Michael, with regard 
benign? 

" Adam, thou know'st heav'n His, and all the earth, 
Not this rock only; His omnipresence fills 
Land, sea, and air, and every kind that lives, 
Fomented by His virtual pow'r and warm'd: 

Yet doubt not but in valley and in plain 
God is as here, and will be found alike 
Present, and of His presence many a sign 
Still following thee, still compassing thee round 
With goodness and paternal love.'* 

And finally, how innane are the gibes so 
often flung at the converse of Adam and 
Eve in Paradise. For the nobler gentle- 
women of the seventeenth century that 
Milton knew, English and Italian alike, 
spoke a language far more stately than that 
of our fluent and often flippant dames and 
maidens. Even Romeo and Juliet hardly 
talked like modern sweethearts. How, in 
sooth, were the parents of all the living to 
address each other.'* Was Adam to greet 
Eve with some such song as Herrick's 
Cherry Ripe.^ 

** Cherry ripe, ripe, ripe, I cry. 
If so be you ask me where 
They do grow, I answer, there 

35 



Where my Eva*s lips doe smile, 
There's the land or cherry isle 
Whose plantations fully show 
All the year where cherries grow/* 

And was Eve to reply, as Dryden made her 
reply in his never-acted opera, the State of 
Innocence, in which he ''tagged Milton's 
verses'' and sullied them with an impure 
fancy ? Shall we chide the poet who made 
the mother of all the living speak with the 
gracious dignity of Vittoria Colonna, or of 
Margaret Roper, the charming child of Sir 
Thomas More? Were our first parents in 
their innocence to indulge in raptures of 
self-abandon rather than to face each other 
in the joy of chaste surprise ? 

Consider the stupendous difficulty of 
Milton's task. An adult pair with no ex- 
perience of childhood ; without society ex- 
cept each other ; with naught to talk about 
until they fell, except the flowers and the 
fruits, and the creatures of the garden, and 
the aspects of earth and sky, and the 
walks and talks with their creator. Milton 
could not pour the riches of his vast and 
varied knowledge into their speech; he 
shows his power by its utter absence. He 
would have made their conversation ludi- 
crous and himself a laughing-stock by 
freighting it with anachronisms and allu- 
sions to things beyond their ken. 

Nor are the critics either very subtle or 

36 



very profound who discover in these scenes 
the persistent shadow of Mary Powell, 
Milton's truant wife, and his supposed 
notions of woman's inferiority. Indeed, 
Milton's conception of the conjugal relation 
here illustrated is nobler than any to be 
found, not merely in contemporary English, 
but in contemporary European literature. 
How mean is the Adam of the Bible story ! 
How tame and cowardly are his recorded 
words! *^The woman thou gavest to be 
with me, she gave me of the tree, and I 
did eat." But Milton endows Adam with 
his own fine courage, and a self-sacrifice 
that verges itowards the sublime. Adam 
disobeys, indeed, but disobeys, not for 
knowledge : he disobeys for love ! 

*' With thee 
Certain my resolution is to die ; 
How can I live without thee, how forego 
Thy sweet converse and love so dearly join'd, 
To live again in these wild woods forlorn ? 
Should God create another Eve, . 

. yet loss of thee 
Would never from my heart: No ! No ! I feel 
The link of nature draw me: flesh of flesh. 
Bone of my bone thou art, and from thy state 
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe.'* 

The notion that the wife should be the 
husband's slave, so universal in the seven- 
teenth century, has by no means disap- 
peared in the twentieth. But Milton, 
rejecting the absurd belief that every 
woman is inferior to any man, boldly 

37 



affirmed that whenever the wife proved 
superior, she ought to bear rule according 
to the law of nature that subjects the 
lower to the higher being. No! Eve is 
not the illustration of a thesis; to be de- 
picted at all she must be depicted within the 
limit of the ancient story. Neither is she 
Mary Powell. Happy indeed had Milton 
been, if Mary Powell had been another 
Eve, for then she would have inspired in 
him a love like that which triumphed in the 
Garden. Then, like Adam, he might have 
found in her that which 

** Argued in her something more sublime 
And excellent than what her mind contemned.*' 

Unfortunately for him, there was in his 
first wife no such fathomless depth of af- 
fection as Eve disclosed when about to 
leave the places that she loved. 

"But now lead me on; 
In me is no delay ; with thee to go 
Is to stay here; without thee here to stay 
Is to go hence unwilling; thou to me 
Art all things under Heaven, all places thou 
Who for my wilful crime art banished hence.** 

Nor was it any recollection of Mary Powell 
that inspired the picture of love triumphant 
amid the havoc of wrong-doing, so touch- 
ing in its quiet beauty, with which the 
poem closes. 

**Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped 
them soon; 
The world was all before them, where to choose 

38 



Their place of rest, and Providence their guide, 
They hand in hand, with wandering steps and 

slow 
Through Eden took their solitary way.** 

Do you remember the music of the eighth 

book's opening lines? 

**The angel ended, and in Adam's ear 
So charming left his voice, that he awhile 
Thought him still speaking, still stood fix'd to hear/' 

Dryden, Addison, Wordsworth, thought 
Milton still speaking, and each of them 
stood fixed to hear. 

''Milton, thou shouldst be living at this 
hour!'' was Wordsworth's invocation, audit 
befits every time that needs a voice whose 
sound is like the sea that can be heard afar. 
If, then, I have chosen to write rather of 
the architect than of his work, it is because 
Milton stood for every ideal that we in 
America are called to realize. He stood 
for a republic, in which the wisest and best 
should rule ; he stood for a free church in 
a free state, for sane and rapid methods of 
education, for unchecked research and lib- 
erty of speech, for pure literature and noble 
art, for the people and not for irresponsible 
rulers or privileged classes, for the laws of 
God to which all constitutions and statutes 
must conform, for sublimity of life, for 
righteousness of conduct, for that universal 
and mild monarchy that shall put an end 
to every earthly tyranny. For these he 
stood, for these he fought undauntedly, 

39 



and at the last alone. '^I was ever a 
fighter/' sings Mr. Browning. Grant it 
freely. But when I contrast the blind 
Samson of the Revolution and the Restora- 
tion with the elegant poet of the Victorian 
age, I cannot be altogether deaf to a touch 
of brag in Browning's words. That strong 
right arm of John Milton held useless 
behind his back while with the left he fights 
his battles, those beautiful but sightless 
eyes, all ^^ knowledge at one entrance 
quite shut out, ' ' — they are the marks of the 
greatest literary fighter in English history, 
a fighter never more wonderful and never 
more triumphant than when he organized 
his mightiest victory, his immortal poem, 
from the wreck of a republic and the ruin 
of his hopes. 




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